Improving MetaData Performance of the Ext4 Journaling Device

There is always a relentless pursuit of more performance from our storage systems. This includes more performance from hardware (faster disks, SSD‚Äôs), network (bigger pipes, larger MTU‚Äôs), operating systems (caching, IO schedulers), and file systems. There are many levers than can be moved to improve performance but this article will look at one particular piece - the file system journal device. In particular, the metadata performance of ext4 will be considered as the journal is moved to different devices...